


Interlude

by slire



Series: And I must borrow every changing shape [1]
Category: Mushishi
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Gen, mushi!Ginko, sequel to S01E21: Cotton Changeling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 04:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9803504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slire/pseuds/slire
Summary: The Hitotake-mushi (the face in the glass jar) is a curious thing, and gets under Ginko's skin.





	

**Author's Note:**

> new series! it's different from [the shadow biosphere](http://archiveofourown.org/series/257380) in the way that it's an au that operates on a fan-theory. i reference tsb though, and ginko may act odder—more vicious, maybe—here. but the segments are segments and can be read seperately.

His wooden backpack is full of small hidden rooms. In them are many a thing he'd prefer hidden from the grabby hands of a certain village doctor / self-titled mushi-connsiuer. One of these things is a face in a jar. Perfectly normal, if your name is Ginko. 

The mushi-master lies still beneath a tent made out of sticks and big green leaves. It is not rain—which falls in fat drops in autumn, _not yet_ —he's shielded from; it's the sun, an unbearable summer sun. It is midday, the hottest hour. A stream tickles nearby. Flies buzz. He uses a flat rock as a pillow. Bugs quarrel in the grass outside his tent. A little spider lies within its big web, which ants keep walking right into—maybe to eat the spider?—and get stuck in. These days are all sleepy. People usually have adapt and change and the heat no longer sting their skin or melt their brain. One eats less and drinks more, and slower. Always an anomaly, Ginko's pale complexaion has left him with a potentially crippling sunburn. His skin is smeared with healing mud. He cools himself in the brown of earth, leaf-rot-scented, a spray of calm in the ochre of his makeshift nature-bed. Afloat, he day-dreams; the river as seen by mushi, bright and brilliant and pure—dreams of himself swept into the cold of that exulting and abounding stream. Opens his eyes, sighs.

Ginko is bored.

Frowning (an expression! Abnormal for Ginko the expressionless, Ginko the strange), he rummages through his backpack. It's in need of oil: wood's chirped, dry. When he moves, his still-healing knife wound in his stomach hurts, left there by a parent who was not a parent protecting a child who was not a child. Is this the first sign of decay, of autumn? A passage into something windier, moments of longer shadows and rising breezes. Wind chimes will become alarm bells and green-alive leaves will turn to paper, scratching at the ground. And then the rain will come, and everything will turn soggy and difficult. Nature operates in extremes. It's very hot, and it's also late. Two more hours with daylight. 

**—stard.**

"…?"

Pulling out his hand from his backpack, he finds a string whirled around his errant thumb. Attached to the string is a glass jar, whose content is familiar and unwelcome in the quiet of his hiding place.

**Bastard,** the blasé voice repeats, and he sees the face inside the glass jar, equally expressionless. **Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.**

"You haven't stopped at all, haven't you?"

**You locked me in there, knowing my concept of time is like yours. I suffered.** The little Hitotake-mushi tastes the word as if unfamiliar, **Suffered.**

"You were being boring."

The face is very ugly, green and unblinking. Monsterous. Who could love it but a mother? She'd stabbed Ginko of her own free will. Without its connection to the Watahaki, however, the masterful copying of human nature is a burden to the Hitotake-mushi rather than a means to grow; stuck in water, it cannot create spores, and so is without true purpose. All that's left is a very human curiosity. Some ugly half-human half-mushi thing.

**My curiosity was tolerated until I started questioning you. You told me you were gonna kill me. I asked why you did not.**

"And it may still be so," Ginko says coldly, scratching a line of dried mud from his real eye. It crusts under his fingernails. "Or it may not.  Everything is only as it is."

**Even to my limited human understanding, that sounds sarcastic.**

"Really? I have been saying that for years. Besides, you're a little experiment. That's why I'm keeping you alive, for now."

**There is something wrong with you.**

"Oi, oi. Your sort really do copy humans well. I've been hearing that for years." As a child, wandering and lost, forever cursed by the need to move. With groups of mushishi, with monks, other traveling folk. Often alone. 

**There are two souls within me. I want to run from you, to give in to instinct, to flee.** A pause. The voice does not change, monotone and eerie, but the pauses speak volumes. **But I also want to eat you.**

"Mm, there it is. That's the reason I have to keep you in a jar, little one: your inhumanity. But it's also the reason I must forever move."

Already, already, mushi swarm around him. He had stayed here for two nights in a row. Too long. Adashino's old question echoing in his mind: _"Do you ever get tired, old friend?"_ Ginko lights his mushi-repelling cigarette; inhales, exhales. 

**What happens if you stay one place to long?**

"I become a nest for mushi." Typical questions lead to typical assumptions. Ginko grows bored. He sniffs the air, catches a whiff of something. A storm? 

**How do you know this?**

The questions are becoming annoying again: the Hitotake-mushi better see Ginko's frown. The mud on his face cracks, winkles. Bright green eyes (one real one fake) narrow. "Because I have always known. A village elder once tried to test it. It did not bode well for anybody." How many had lived in Shiroku? 200, 300? Three hundred humans put to death while Ginko laid unconscious in a cave. But remember: everything is only as it is. And yet…

**How long have you known?**

"Always been like this." Or: it's been like this as far back as he can remember. And he can't remember far. There is a gap, he knows. A black hole in his head.  

**Why do you not let them build a nest?**

"I have a duty. And I feel love towards my species, and wish to help them," Ginko says.

**How old are you?**

"I don't know. I do not count. Around thirty, I'd assume?"

**...How long have you been around thirty?  
**

The black hole in his head throbs in time with the one in his gut. The mother had run against him like he was the demon, and not the mushi that'd eaten the child in her womb. Is the gut wound infected? The smell, the smell is so bodily as to be confusing. Somewhere between food and terror and the sea. 

"You're boring me," Ginko says.

**You smell of something ancient. If you truly loved our species, you'd let us eat you.**

"How is it that whenever you come to conclusions, they are violent? Don't answer. I do not allow your kin to consume me because there are still things I must do. When my time comes, I will go." Ginko' eye glaze over. His past, haunting him. A great darkness and only a name—but something else, too, an instinctive knowledge. "Everything is only as it is."

What is the smell of thunder? The scent of lightning? The air fills ears and noses like sap. Trees slouch. Waves of heat rose off blacktop that stuck to your sneakers like chewing gum. The smell before the storm is metal, the smell of blood from his wound, back when it was fresh. A whiff of warning. The coming of a crash. The arrival of a fear.

**You are mushi.**

"I disagree," Ginko says lightly. The Hitotake-mushi / person hybrid is not the first creature to assume this. Sighing once more, he decides to wash his face in the river soon; use the daylight to find a more secure hiding place, maybe. Yet his mouth moves without his consent because of stupid human pride, "If we're talking about copy-cats, you'd know more than me. You were the imposter." 

It is a turning point, this dialogue. It must be the wound and the sun and the storm making him delirious. Yes.

**And what about you? The real thing?** It does sound human, now, having mastered something decidedly sarcasm-like. Ginko doubts the parents did much mental sparring with it, so it must learn fast: interesting and dangerous. If a mushi can become human that fast... **Then I must ask. Which are you most? Human or mushi?**

"I'm god."

Then he crushes the glass jar with the stone he'd used as a pillow. 

At the sound of the first thunder Ginko stands up and shudders slightly, brushes the earth from his face and hurries off, lest Truth will get him. The thunder is a voice crying out in a dream, clearing its throat from somewhere beyond vowels and consonants. Ginko shields his ears.


End file.
